


What Sebastian Remembers.

by fearless_seas



Series: the crooked pieces of our galaxy [2]
Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Character Development, Developing Relationship, First Meetings, Heartbreak, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Memories, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 07:03:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17198798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearless_seas/pseuds/fearless_seas
Summary: Three years after their final night together, Lewis tries to convince him that he's changed. But he hasn't. Nothing's changed. And Sebastian only wishes that he could believe him.





	What Sebastian Remembers.

**Author's Note:**

> This was done as a request from @godbastian on Tumblr! I didn't put the prompt line in but it followed the theme of forgetting/remembering :) I hope everyone enjoys!
> 
> This reads better if you read the installment right before it but it can be read by itself, if you would like.

          You never forget.

          You only choose what to remember.

           Take the balcony. Early 2017. You’ll remember that forever.  How the party rippled a magnetic storm behind you through the glass and shivers of music sent vibrations beneath your fingertips . It was late winter,  nearly spring: the idea of new life and beginning. You hadn’t spoken to him,  truly spoken to him since you parted ways. When he forced you out-- _ or was it I who left? _ The thought shakes away as you turn to greet his eyes under the shadowed ceiling. He doesn’t grin but his voice sounds genuine as you’ve never heard him been before.  He asks of your family, his vocals attempting to light the spark of conversation… a flame of old connection . Older, that's how he appears. It’s been a while since you’ve looked to him square in the face but the years have taken a refined toll on his features. You notice him trying, even as you don’t touch him, as you force a smile to your wine-stained lips. You hold yourself at a distance as though he bites, because you know, better than anyone, if given the chance: he will. You settle into this comfortable interaction. You notice he continues leaning towards you as if begging you:  _rest your weary mind on my shoulder, love. _

“Let’s go somewhere private,” he suggested. He reaches for your glass and in that slight moment, your knuckles brush as you climb to your feet. A million memories flash before you and you suddenly wish to stumble forward drunk into his open arms. Instead, you grab for the corner of a table and his hand slides over your back. “Are you okay, Sebastian?”, he wonders, his voice dripping with subtle concern. You remember yourself huddled with his hands coasting the cusp of your hips, his lips ghosting at the pulse in your neck as you wondered if he would choose to kiss or kill you. You can pretend, for just that time that things haven’t changed. A secret part of you wishes that they hadn’t. It’s the flash that causes your mind to whiten. He whispers, _are you okay?_ And things haven’t. _You know this because your first thought at his seemingly honest action is to question:_  _is he asking for his own sake or mine?_

           “Nothing important,” you lie. But it was everything to you.

           You’ll always remember your younger days. Your hair was lighter and your blue eyes twinkle with a curious admiration for the future to come. But most of all, you recall him. He’d climb into his car and put it on pole without a single word.  These were times when all things appeared bright and infinite within the grasp of your pale fingertips . You don’t recollect a single one of the words spoken between you.  Every time you spoke, it was a gentle but strict pillow of laughter that sipped  carefully into the atmosphere . His dark eyes are soft like honey, cut and glazed as steel. You missed him the moment that he always stepped away from you.

           He leads you to the balcony that night with his palm on your bicep before it trickles downwards to the bed of your wrist. He holds it tightly, enough to break the skin but he only wants to keep you from leaving again. _Maybe I should not have left_ , you think. It’s his lyrics, bitter and regretful as they stung out of his tongue the last night you spent together. Perhaps your cheek still contains a blushing scar of when his fist of words collided with your skin...

           “I think you should leave.”

           You swat this out of your head like a fly as he opens the door. You are greeted with the night sky, the marble balcony and… his skin underneath the pale moonlight. And nothing’s changed. _Nothing ever changes with him_ _._ You’re still lost in how beautiful he appears when his mind is clear. You still love him despite everything--even knowing he doesn’t truly love you but needs you to make his glass world keep moving round and round…   

           You once glanced to him and your vision ignited into a kaleidoscope of infinite color.  He’s standing beside you, as you  foolishly convince yourself that years of separation never occurred . That your heart never ached, that you didn’t spent hours with your knees up to your chest like a child. That… you can begin again once more and that with every spring comes a new beginning. But it stings, because you look to him now and you only feel tired. All you want is to give him more of what you are.

            _But I’ve already given him so much_.

           There are things about your youth with him that you consign to oblivion.  Not how the shafts of his shine pushed and pressed through his fragile skin in the paddock of the Formula 3 garages . Or even how his lips push towards you as he speaks like dark rose buds. It’s how he never meets your eyes. It should’ve been a sign from the beginning, one for you to ignore him as he passes. He always looked past you.  Behind his back, you drew him portraits with careful strokes of color even as you didn't know if he remembered your name at all .

           That’s what catches you off guard on the balcony.  You're both settled eleven years later beneath a blanket of a thousand glittering stars and he keeps attempting to caress your eyes with his . He waxes on and on about the past to promote some type, any type, of conversation with you. It’s as though he’s making an effort to understand you as he never chose to before. You’re not a frightened person but you fear this more than anything.  The moonlight creeps like pale honey, slow, sweet and thick across the railing when his voice, dense as midnight speaks  harshly into the blue darkness . You don’t want to give into his charm; you don’t want to give him another thing of yours ever again. You smile  sweetly but never for too long, you nod but shortly and your voice is curt as one is with a lost friend…

           And it only makes you sad.

           You gave it to him ten years ago. He remembers your presence but not your name, your loyalty but never your face. You're still young so you imagine that one kiss of his will be the very thing to illuminate your night. That he is what causes the world to shine and keeps your incessant heart beat clambering forward. Not a thing occurs for two years between you two.  Occasionally , your eyes meet across a race track or press conferences as collections of reporters follow the  nearly new champion .  You continue, you give him pieces and pieces of yourself every time his fingertips brush up against your starving skin .  And, in the end, it was your fault he left you dead: you handed him the power in his muscled fist, the one to hold your soul and the very fire swaying within your core . The last thing you gave him was your trust.  Trust is a fragile, frail flame; sheltered from the bitter wind only by huddled and committed palms .

           He shifts beside you, throwing you out of your reverie. The moonlight glistens at a piece of jewelry around his neck. Your fingers curl over the railing, out towards the horizon.  Your knuckles protrude through the skin like ivory and your desire,  _ oh god _ , you only wish to tangle your fingers in the collar of his shirt . He left behind a party to be with you, the very thing he’d always turned you away for. He’s undressing his heart, something that he has never done before. Your fingers itch and quiver against the spring wind. You want him, you want to touch him--then you reminisce your words as you left:

           “Nobody was keeping me from leaving. So why did I stay in the first place?”

           So, maybe, you did leave. But it’s not as though he wanted you there in the first place.

           You choose to remember little moments. The first year in Formula 1. His calloused fingers brushed at the base of your spine, in the type of touch that makes you shiver. Grasps to your wrist or around your trembling aching shoulders. You valued these when you were younger and more naive.  Then, you  were attracted to shine, beauty and allure because you never knew the darkness each diamond pretends it never was . This is why you loved him. You witness it in his eyes when he congratulates you after his win: he believes the gift to you is his presence. But he’s never there, the air behind him is empty and you understood that he never actually cared. He never congratulates you when you score better. Instead, he parts his way with his sunglasses on into the parking and you don’t see him until next race weekend.

           You don’t know if you were ever friends. At all. Only ever orbiting stars living among the same universe. You both speak a few times in that first year. 2007.  He lost the championship that year and he always sounds tired; a mature, breathless quality coming out in every line he spoke . Above all else: you admired him. You’re toiling in a minor car as he  nearly wins the championship in his first season. But he doesn’t win that season. You wouldn’t care any less if he did or didn’t.

           He didn’t congratulate you on anything that day.

          Back to the balcony. You know he’s thinking about how different you seem now, you know he peers to you as he tries a multitude of tactics to engage you and thinks: t _hings have changed._

           But they haven't.

           Because you love him but he only ever needed you.

           You cared too much then; and now you don’t care at all.

           In one movement, his hand slides towards yours. It is sudden--too bitter to forget. But he’s touching you as you always wanted. So why aren’t you happy? _Why, Sebastian?_ You wish he’d never reached for you in the first place, that you’d part ways and return to stiff handshakes and eyes that meet occasionally over a distance wider than an ocean. You suppose it’s a pain, that you never learned how to swim over it (but he was the the one with the raft).

           In 2008 he learns your name and it’s the first year he cares. He wins the championship and you seek him out at his hotel room that very evening. The first night you sleep with a man, his dreams of having five championships blur the lines of every kiss. You come through the door and he doesn’t even look at you, he reaches for you first and rips you into his guarded arms. He tastes bittersweet as alcohol does on an unfamiliar tongue. His piercing lips meet at the tender spots of your throat and his hands coast the horizon of your hips. Every stroke of your tongue, it whispers: _I love you, I love you, oh how I love you_. You soften in his grip when his fingers reach beneath your shirt. All it takes is this to remind you how electric life can truly feel. You want him within you, smothering your thoughts into obscurity, indulging in the sacred nature of your dreams. You desire him within your heart dancing and flowing with affection. You crave him in places you’d never allowed anyone before. Most of all: you need him all over you, all the time.

           The first time you sleep with another man, he never says your name, he never says anything about you. But you pretend he did all the same. You pretend this as you bury your fingers in the charms of his hair, or your teeth bite into the flesh of his shoulder. You pretend between the euphoria that he’d never demanded of you:

           “You won’t tell anyone about this.”

           That you’d never replied: “Of course.”

           That’d he only whispered at the moonlight across your skin, “Sebastian…”

           And you breathe it over and over as you have for years: “Lewis.”

           Nine years later you’re still on the balcony. Your attentions shift downwards to the hand he has placed over yours. His touch is careful as an apology but forced all the same. It frightens you: because he’s peering towards you right now as you yearned him to years ago.

           He kicked you out after the first night you spent together. He lay there breathless but not at a loss for words.  You feel bruised but the euphoria of the night transformed any pain into exquisite allure . He always made everything broken and beautiful. You had reached for him and he recoiled uninterested from your touch.

           “Have I done something wrong?”, you ask to the man whose bed you're in.

           That stranger replies, “Pick up your clothes and leave.”

           So you do. Without protest. You don’t even hesitate or fight.  Good little, Sebastian, always doing what he  is told . But that was never you. You spent the time between seasons touching yourself on that memory alone. Lost yourself in the imagination that you’d stayed the night in his bed as you had always hankered for.

           When the next season starts, you expected never to speak to him again. But he rings you up and you play into his hands. Despite all judgement, you go to his hotel room and it happens again. And each time you think: _perhaps it may be different_. People never change, as places never do; only the foundation built upon them alters (not the ground beneath).  You return empty and disillusioned to your hotel room where you pass out on the floor of your own misery. Eventually you get up, you pack your things and you catch your flight home. And it happens again next race weekend. The next after too.

           You relive this.

           That’s why you move your hand away from his eight years later.

           You convince yourself that you needed it this way. But you know it is what you want.

           “What are you doing?”, you attempt to sound firm, strict, to rise above his egotism. But you sound weak, shaky and smaller.

           What comes next shocks you more than anything. He moves his hand away from yours and his features have grown pale. He’s as surprised as you. But he pauses, his jaw tightening at the rejection before he turns his eyes outwards at the tree lining. “Nothing,” he lies. You know he is lying because he’s done it to you many times before. You’ve never seen him so vulnerable, you’ve never seen him actively turn his eyes away first. He’s never come second at anything.

           Seven years before. You both lost that season and it shattered you in a way. He’d started studying you behind your back. But, after all that, all it took was one sentence. Spoken as you was picking up your clothing off of the carpet (without being told):

           “Do you want to stay?”

           He asked you a question. It catches you off guard. You anticipated  miserably and, for the first time, he observes you. He  openly  searches for your approval. There isn’t a hint of spite that should be there when you reply: “If you want me to.”

           The comfort of his warm bed vanquished all your fears in an instant. And it was a place you felt you  truly belonged.

           Sure, you remember this.

           But there was one early morning that stands out the most.

           You’re just falling asleep, the lids of your eyes trembling into darkness. A still whisper arrives across the hazy atmosphere:

           “You make me want thing I cannot have.”

           All you wanted was to get up and wrap your arms over his neck. But you don’t. You lay still and restful as his quiet breaths are pillows for your mind to ease upon.

           You hum before replying, “Then take what it is you want.”

           Simple. Concise. And he never did. He rolled over onto his side, the one away from the window and fell asleep. You spent the rest of the night struggling to shut yourself off once again.  Eventually you do because you imagine Christmases and vacations with him; days under the sun or buried in a cabin .  Hope is a dangerous thing--nothing is more destructive or powerful in the entire universe . That’s what he kept you clinging to: hope.

           You, Sebastian, stare at his hand shifting away from yours on the railing seven years later. That lie that slips out of his tongue, _nothing_ , breathes a certain resent in you.

           “We…”, you sigh, the resent brews into hurt. How dare he reach for you now; how dare he pretend that he never did a thing; how dare he want to know you after you'd already fixed yourself up. You want to tell him that it’s too late. Instead you settle: “That ended a long time ago.” Four years ago.

           2010. You had made the dream: you won a world championship and you’re the youngest to ever do so. He still sticks around although you sense his bitterness when he touches you. When you return that next season, 2011, your name is known around the world. Sebastian Vettel--youngest Formula 1 champion ever. You relish in the pride that this gives you. You win it for a second time while he despises his team.

           He rings you up often in your hotel room. “Are you coming around tonight?”, he would inquire, his tone is slicing.

           Most often you spraying a bit of cologne on in the bathroom mirror, preparing to go out. “Do you want me to?”, you would pause on the end of your bed.

           “Do you have plans?”

           "Yes, but--”

           “Then don’t bother,” he hangs up.

           The phone goes across the room and you fume the entire evening on a collection of alcohol and the pang of a sorrowful heart . Sometimes you go out together. Movies or a walk.  But, always by the time a third person recognizes you for an autograph--he disappears into the crowd . It was worse after that second because in the season while you’re working yourself to a third, you see less of him. You get lost in parties, friendships because at least that is where you’re not the only one giving devotion.

           In the silence of your previous words, five years later, he simply says, “I know.” He sounds regretful for the first time in his life. You noticed that you’ve slid a little farther from him and there isn’t the comfort that there was before. What he mentions next cuts through you like glass: “You’ve changed.”

           You want to scream at him.

            _I never changed--I never fucking changed._

            _I only grew into the person I was meant to be._

           And he was never around to see it.

           Instead, you swallow, restrain yourself and reply, “We all do."

           Except him. He clearly never changed.

           2013. You begin spending far less nights in his bed. He was losing and you weren’t. You know he hates you for that although he’ll never say it. He was different that season. Rougher than he’d ever been. Each kiss is a sting of fire on your skin, every press into you was as though he was trying to take something from you.  Maybe he was. His nails bite into the flesh of your shoulders and your upper arms. After, you take a minute to get up and examine the angry, scarlet marks naked in front of the mirror.

            _Why do you enjoyed hurting me?_

           This time you say what is on your mind: “Why do you do that?”

           He glares at you as though you are a foreign creature. A stranger he doesn't recognize. Something to pick apart under his microscopic vision. You realize then  perhaps he does love you, but he doesn’t care. His skin is sticky with sweat and you want to reach for him, kiss the gentle spot at the base of his neck. You’re gotten older and so has he. Your jaw is sharper and his eyes hardened; you’ve lost the pout in your lip and he never lost the danger in him.

           Memories are a hazardous thing in themselves.

           You turn them over and over.

           Until you recognize every corner and edge.

           Then you cut yourself on a piece.

           You play that final night over and over in your mind and you’re bruised and battered because of it.

           Because you gaze to him and neither of you recognized the other. You could’ve been strangers all the same. And  perhaps , after all this time, that is all you were. Not friends, never lovers. Strangers who return to each other’s bed in the act that there was a care between you to.

           “I think we should talk--”

           He cuts you off and in one fellow swoop everything comes crashing down: “You should leave.”

           People never change; only what makes them does.

           The years between you meant nothing after all. You don’t bother to dress and every sting on your skin makes you feel as though you deserved it. But you didn’t. You hate him for the first time in your life.  You never hated the boy from F3 who raced besides you; you never hated the man who forgot your name; you never hated the celebrity with a championship .  You only ever hated yourself, for returning and returning and returning once more to him even after you were not wanted there . Or you were, but he’d never tell you that. But you hate him now.

           You open the door to leave but pause. You call backwards into the room: “Nothing was keeping me from leaving. So why did I stay in the first place?” The door shuts behind you and, since then, you haven't spoken to him, truly spoken to him, until tonight.

           “You’re different,” he’s not meeting your eyes. He plucks a flower out of the dirt and tosses it over the balcony.

           “I’m not too different, Lewis.” He threw you out of his life. You have too many wings to be broken. “I didn’t change, I grew up.” And he wasn’t there for that--he was never there for anything.

           He doesn’t say a word so you make a move to leave. You’ll leave him behind for the first time in your life. But it’s not you who is held back, it is not you who chose to stay a little longer. It was him, grabbing for your wrist as you reached for a door to escape the vulnerability the moonlight gave you. He begs you to wait. He’s never done that to anybody in his entire life. Against your better judgment, you fall into the memory of his hands upon you. For the first time, you study his eyes and there is a glimmer of something you recognize so well. And god damn it if it wasn’t exactly how you used to look at him. Lost adoration. You stay because you recognize yourself and you wish he’d done the same that you are doing now.

           “Okay, I am waiting.”

           He steals a deep breath and loosens his grip. _Already ready to let me go again?_

           He tells you that he cares about you. You want to call him a liar but there is desperate sob nestled in the back of his throat. “I always have,” he says, and all you want is to believe him. He tells you that you were what was missing from his life. He says you changed him. He says, without saying so, that he loves you. He says--

           And you don’t care. Because he pushed you away.

           You picked yourself right back up and soldiered on without his help.

           You don’t budge: “Then why did you push me away?”

           But you already know the answer.

           Then he hesitates, at a loss for words. He mentions something that crawls itself from your past. He means it as he did that night years ago: “You make me want things I cannot have.”

           You recall the night. He said the same and never did a thing about it. Even after you told him to reach for you, to tug you closer so you could sense his heartbeat through your back.

           But the only thing keeping you staying now is the strong grip on your wrist that prevents you from leaving.

           Even after all this time.

           He is still trying to get his way.

           “But nobody has stopped you,” you mention.

           He maintains that he knows, that he is sorry.

           And you want to believe him. You want to with all that you are. But you don’t. Not even for a moment. Even though you know you should

           But you recollect returning to your hotel room after you left for the final time. You recall falling to the floor and wanting to do anything,  _ anything _ but sit there crying. And after all, you were  just a fool living in your imagination. Wandering in stupid ideas such as falling in love and him care for you.  After two hours, you called up Kimi and he  wordlessly settled into a corner of the room with alcohol from the hotel mini-fridge . Your face  was buried in your hands and the room blurred between your clenched fingertips. You told him everything.

           “I’m so fucking stupid,” you took a swig as you finished, handing the bottle back to Kimi.

           You notice he continued examining you out of the corner of his eye. “Go out and get someone else,” he suggested with a curt shrug. At this, you peered upwards, your eyes red with tears. His facial expression was tight as if he was still processing all that you had told him. “You have it deep,” he shook his head  softly and  sympathetically .

           You chuckled, “I didn’t need you to tell me that.” _Believe me, I already know_.

           “So what,” he sighed, “You’ll get over it.”

           “I won’t--”

           “You will,” his azure eyed shone then and you recognized that he was being honest. “I never said you will forget,” he said, “but you’ll move on.”

           “But--”

           Kimi had never been this talkative before. He leaned towards you, knocking you with his shoulder blade. “Fuck him,” he snorts, “if he never cared in the first place, why do you?”

           You were at a loss for words and you didn’t speak the rest of the evening; if you did, you don’t remember.

           Now you aren’t at a loss. Now you snap back at his pathetic apology: “Didn’t you notice? You changed, not me.” But you’d like to hope that he did. “You’re always winning, so now you want things to go back?”, you step forward and he backs away, wide eyed, “Right? Everything is going your way.” He wants you back because he wants everything or nothing. He couldn’t stand when you were better, when you were winning. The both of you are chest to chest and you sense his fluttering heartbeat bleeding between the two of you.

           You want him to crumple. You want him to cry. You want him to react.  You want him to do anything but stand there with that stupid, wide-eyed expression surprised at your fervor . He never once understood how spitting the fire in your bones could be.

          Eventually he does react. “Jealous?", he scoffs, "You think I was jealous of you?”

          He wasn’t envious. He was bitter. He needed to destroy you because it made himself feel better about it all. And you should hate him for that. But you don’t. No matter how hard it is that you try.

           You say it. The very thing that’s been on your mind for nine years.

          “But you didn’t like it when I was happy.”

          It’s out and there is no taking it back now. 

          He chews this up. Line by line. Dissects and picks it apart. Your words leave a blitzing scar across his cheek just as his did to you. He lets go of you because he recognized that he’d lost. You wonder if you looked like this when he did the same to you. _Did I appear so lost, so confused and angry… so hurt._

          But most of all, he understands: _everything has changed_.

          While you know for certain: _nothing has changed_.

          You made up your mind a long time ago.

_If he never cared in the first place, why do I?_

          “I’m going to leave.” 

          There is nothing left.

          You don’t wait to  be told , you don’t wait to  be asked . You leave.  You leave him to contemplate himself underneath the infinity of stars alone and empty . You still count every star where you are and write him metaphors in the millions. But you never understood the ones in his eyes. You carry him inside of you, on your fingertips or the fibers of your brain; in the center of who you are and what matters. Because a tiny part of you will always love him. 

          A few weeks later. Australia. 2017. 

          There’s a moment after your win. 

          He approaches you and lays a hand on your lower back. He says, “Congratulations.” He smiles and meets your eyes with his.

          It throws you off guard so you don’t smile immediately back without meaning to. Or maybe you did.

          People never change. Only the foundation they are built upon.

          But you still remember how he tastes. You remember the sound his breath as he sleeps. You remember the bitter sweet way that he made you feel. You remember how the groves of his spine sensed beneath your fingertips. You remember the pattern his features exploded to beneath moonlight. You remember… him; and that was the most important thing.

          Because you forget everything else.

          Across the paddock, he feel him looking to you once more.

          You turn and actively make the choice to meet his eyes.

          It’s standing at a distance with your faces collided as they used to before.

          People never change. They only grow more and more into the people that they are meant to be.

          It takes a moment but for the first time in his life, Lewis Hamilton smiles at you first.

Maybe you will live to be so old that one day you have completely forgotten you were never supposed to be together at all. That there may be a chance you two will meet. By accident, late at night doing nothing at all. There will be that blind spark that drove you incessantly mad, that drove you apart. Time, it has softened him with age but he’s still the same champion. The spark will have the sense to understand the flame it is supposed to be _and it will weld us together_.

          But for now?

          You are still young and reckless. 

          So this time; you only smile back. 

         And that was enough for the both of you. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed I urge you to leave kudos or a comment because it barely takes a moment in contrast to the hours something like this takes someone to write. My Tumblr is @pieregasly. Thank you!


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